Hacker Musings and OCD

Thoughts on Komodo 8

First, there’s a lot of good: the visual refresh is much needed, and the update of the core components is even more helpful. Having applications based on Mozilla really need all the great stuff Mozilla has come out with lately.

So that’s awesome. It feels faster and lighter, and looks prettier. Moving language keywords into the snippets library is awesome.

What bugs me is that some things seemed almost like a no-brainer to add, and they’re not there.

Node.js is sort of a big deal right now. No built-in node shell? Mozilla themselves use the hell out of Node so it’s not like Node is some sort of ‘enemy’ technology. And in any event, we’re on version 8 and there’s not even a Spidermonkey-based shell. I cannot be the only person that uses a lot of JS shell.

I’m sort of shocked that there’s no real improvement to the source control stuff. A couple of basic commands, no real UI.

Speaking of source control: I’m equally shocked that there’s no Github or Bitbucket integration. Imagine how awesome it would be to have your project push directly. The obvious retort – “Well, no one asked for it!” is just as perplexing.

The macro/expansion API seems more-or-less the same. It’s already pretty comprehensive and effective but there’s lots of obvious gaps, and I’m shocked no one notices them (eg, you can’t do a bunch of stuff via the keybinding UI or via macros; you have to click).

I’m amazed that anyone likes the minimap thing and I feel like it’s going to end up a giant “what were we thinking?” feature, but whatever. Opinions and assholes, I guess.

Worst of all, RC1 is still buggy as hell. Forum chatter indicates they’re closing bugs really fast now, but it gives me The Fear that it won’t really be usable for a few minor releases. As I write this, there’s a really annoying display/redraw bug that’s making me almost motion-sick. This is a release-candidate.